As I mentioned in my previous post, I’ve accomplished the goal I have been driving for since I signed up for my first Ironman in September of 2004. At the time I set the goal, I thought it would be easy.

As I learned at Ironman Wisconsin in September 2005, it wasn’t going to be easy. It was going to take a lot of hard work, sacrifice and support from my wife. Looking back I’m glad it happened this way, I appreciate the enormity of what I’ve accomplished more then I would have if I had made it at my first Ironman. How do I know this? I look at some of the other goals and/or major acheivements I’ve accomplished in my life and the ones that came easily I didn’t value. Chances are had I qualified for Kona on the first try, I would enjoy this sport nearly as much as I do now.

But now I’ve reached a point, nearly 3 years later and I have achieved my goal. That leaves me in a different position then I’m used to – I’ve only truly achieved a goal of this stature once or twice in my life – as I generally set my goals rather high and end up [happily] falling just shy of the goal. Although those goals were typically short term (i.e. Current Swim season) goals, not a long term 3-5 year goal that I just chipped away at.

Anyways, what do I set as a goal for the next 3-5 year triathlon goal? To be honest I have dozens of ideas, but I’m having a hard time settling on one, mostly because of a post by Gordo a while back. The jist of the post is that by setting a clear cut completely objective goal of “I want to do an Ironman in X:XX” we will in a way place an artificial cap on our ability to achieve. I’m particularly fond of how he stated it

“So, my experience is that aiming for our highest potential will ALWAYS sell ourselves short, because we sell ourselves short.”

Hard to imagine that in trying to do ourselves a favor by setting a goal, we are in reality placing a limiting factor on our performance by defining what fast means to us at a given point of time.

Time to take a deep breath…

So what do I set as a goal? To be honest I have no idea, and in a way I’m scared to. I’m scared of selling myself short, scared of setting an unobtainable goal, scared to set a goal others will call me crasy for setting.

Who would have thought that crossing a long term goal off your top ten list would cause such a crazy dilemma?

Well I’ve got to head off to a meeting at work. Perhaps when I get back my head will have cleared a bit to reason something out!

Well it’s catch up time. Not in the sense that I have training to catch up on, but it’s time to bring my blog up to date with things, and spend a little time working on the website.

Where to begin? Well Ironman Arizona was a great success. It wasn’t a perfect race, but it was pretty darn close. I won’t go into to much detail about the race in my blog – I’ll save that for the race report section of my site, which is coming soon – but I bettered my time from IMWI by about 40 minutes. Normally I’d say that’s equal to a 25-30 minute improvement, but we had some pretty crazy winds out there on the bike, and I had a flat so I’ll call it an even 40 minute improvement!

That performance earned me a spot at Ironman Hawaii, which has been my driving goal for the last two years. What my next goal is/will be/should be is a blog in and of itselef. Mary and I are thrilled at the prospect of going to Hawaii in October.

A wrinkle introduced by qualifying is the fact that I have registered for Ironman Wisconsin, only 5 weeks before Kona. That’s a mighty tight recovery window; and while I seem to be recovering very quickly from Arizona, who knows how I will recover from Wisconsin. In addition to that, who knows how my performance at Wisconsin might influence my motivation for the last 5 weeks leading up to Kona. Mary and I talked about it a bit tonight, and she and I agree that it’s probably better to approach Wisconsin as a giant catered training day. I’m going to start the race, do the swim, the bike, and the first 6 miles of the run and end the day with my first DNF. The thought of that doesn’t make me real happy, but Kona is much more important then Wisconsin at this point.

In another first I found out my hometown newspapers featured articles about my race last week! I feel pretty honored to get mentioned in the newspaper. Here is a link to the article I found – Rochester Post-Bulletin. My dad told me there was also an article in the Austin Daily Herald, but I couldn’t find an online version of it.

The remainder of our trip was great – it was mostly a driving trip around Arizona, with a stop at Sedona, Meteor Crater, and the Grand Canyon. We hiked (two days after IMAZ) down to the bottom, camped out, and hiked back up to the top. The trip was a blast. You can take a look at some of our pictures here.

Training wise, last week was mostly 0′s – if you don’t count the hiking – this week I am limited to swimming since my bike got misdirected to Oregon on the way back and won’t be here until this weekend, no running planned until next week probably. I swam for about 50 minutes today:

• 3×300 – Swim/Kick/Swim
• 10×50 @ 1 drill
• 8×50 @ 1 Non Free
• 3×300 @ 4:30

Not to much on the plate except for getting back into the swing of things, and preparing for the DeSoto American Triple-T in a few weeks.

Just a quick update, I’m back from my trip to IMAZ. It was a great race and a great vacation. I came home with a slot for Kona, 3rd place in my age group and 29th overall – 9:46.

I’ll try to post a race report tomorrow.

Well I’m off to catch my plane. I don’t know what I’ll have for internet access while I’m in Arizona so there might not be any updates until I get back – 4/22/2007

It’s very close to the race now, so close that I can feel it. In fact one week from know it will all be over. In fact one week from now I’ll be sitting at the awards dinner chowing on some good food. I’ll know the results of the race, how I did, how others did. And it will all be in the past. I’ll have a nice week of vacation in the American Southwest to look forward to. A hike in the Grand Canyon, all sorts of awesome things.

Except right now none of those awesome things matter, the lunch doesn’t matter. At this point in time the only thing that matters about the trip is the race. To be honest I’m not sure I like that, but like the Oracle said in Matrix Reloaded “We can never see past the choices we don’t understand.” It’s not really a choice and I really don’t even need to understand it, but at this point IM Arizona is a huge thing in front of me that I have to get past first. I’m really looking forward to it, there is a lot of anticipation in my mind – will I remember everything, did I train right, did I train enough, will I pace it right, will I eat enough? All these questions are racing through my mind

What makes it worse right now is that even though all this nervous energy is building up inside I can’t go do anything to expend it, right now my body needs rest.

The good news is that my training the last week or so has been pretty good. Yesterday I went for 1:45 on the trainer at a pretty steady effort and followed it up with a 3.6 mile run (26 minutes flat), which was my fastest ever. Saturday was a pretty easy type day – with part of it spent watching Mary run a half marathon, she did great 1:48, a 1 minute PR, in cold, windy conditions. It was really hard for me to spectate. I wanted to suit up and go run and see what I’m capable of. It seemed a shame to show up at a race with the fitness I have and just watch – grrrrrr. It kills me to speculate about how fast I could have gone, it just flat out drives me nuts. It has taken a lot of effort on my part to try and not speculate.

Not much more to ramble on about….oh yes I do have some more. A huge thanks to the people at Oomph. They came through with a huge homerun for me – and got a pair of Vigor Compression shorts, and a Tri Singlet in my hands even though the shorts were out of stock. I’m super stoked about getting them in time for Arizona this weekend. Thanks Scott and Julie! FWIW – you’ve earned a link on my links page!

Two weeks.

14 days. It’s been a long cycle so far, and that’s all that’s left. My training is pretty much done – at this point there are only a few more days of potential fitness gains before the race, after that all I can do is tire myself out.

Training has been going pretty good. I’ve had some rough days – mostly mental. Last Tuesday I had a great run – I ran 12 miles in 90 minutes increasing pace every 3 miles ( 8 mpm, 7:45, 7:30, 7:15). It went really well, I was able to bring up my pace, while keeping it aerobic the whole time.

Thursday I did a 48 mile ride with a couple HIMish effort intervals in there – followed by a 10k run at IM effort.

Today was the last big day of training, and was planned to be a race simulation. I searched out a course on terrain as similar to Ironman Arizona’s as I could (Pleasant Prairie Tri Olympic Course). The course was exactly what I needed – unfortunately the weather was totally uncooperative – 30+ mph winds, and nasty cold rain. I ended up riding for about 4 hours and running for 45 (planned 4 + 1). I only covered a little over 70 miles – while the speed was disappointing I was really happy with the effort I put in and how I was able to run afterwards (~6.75 miles in a little 48 minutes).

Physically it seems like I’m ready for the race, mentally though I’m not so sure. I’m confident in my ability to do a good swim, and run well off a well paced bike, but I’m not sure what a well paced bike is for me right now. With the time I’ve spent on the trainer this winter – I feel stronger, but I just haven’t had the opportunity to see how I am on the road. I’ve had a couple really strong outside rides, but I’ve also had some really bad rides. In the end I’m going to really have to rely on my HR and PE at Arizona to make sure that I’m not riding beyond my means. I’m confident that if I ride smart I can run a 3:15 marathon, but if I ride to hard – I don’t have a chance at that.

One thing I’m pretty sure about though is – I’m going to do the run on pure PE, so I’ll be dropping my HRM strap in T2 and just running by pace and effort. It worked well for me at Wisconsin, and I think ultimately with the potential for the heat/excitement to artificially inflat my HR on the run, I will probably run a better race by disregarding it.

I’m hoping to head down to PP again this week for a 2 and a half hour ride, hopefully I’ll be able to pick a day where the weather will be nice to get a good idea of what my target effort equates to for a speed.